Black Friday is three weeks away and the security industry in Tennessee is preparing for a holiday season that doesn’t look like any previous one. Foot traffic at malls is down. Online orders are through the roof. Warehouses along Memphis’s logistics corridors are running extra shifts to keep up. The money retailers spend on security hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved.
The Mall Problem
Wolfchase Galleria, the largest mall in the Memphis metro, will have a quieter Black Friday than anyone working there can remember. That’s not a guess. National retail surveys from the International Council of Shopping Centers project that holiday foot traffic will drop between 22% and 30% compared to 2019. Local mall managers expect the reality to be worse, since Tennessee’s COVID case counts are climbing again and consumer confidence in indoor shopping has eroded.
For security operations at malls like Wolfchase, Oak Court, and CoolSprings Galleria in Franklin, lower traffic creates a paradox. Fewer shoppers means fewer incidents of the type that keep mall security busy during a normal holiday season: shoplifting, altercations, lost children, parking lot fender-benders. The numbers are simply lower when there are fewer people.
What hasn’t decreased is the severity of incidents when they occur. Organized retail crime (ORC), the industry term for coordinated theft by groups that steal merchandise for resale, doesn’t slow down because of a pandemic. ORC groups target specific high-value items: electronics, designer clothing, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals. They operate quickly, often with lookouts and getaway drivers, and they don’t care whether the mall is crowded or empty. In some ways, a less crowded store makes their job easier.
A loss prevention manager at a Memphis-area retailer, who asked to remain anonymous because his employer prohibits media contact, described the situation bluntly: “We’ve got fewer customers and the same number of thieves. Our theft-to-sales ratio is the worst I’ve seen in 15 years.”
Retailers are adjusting their security spend accordingly. Several national chains have reduced the number of hours allocated to in-store security during off-peak periods while concentrating guard coverage during the busiest shopping windows: Friday evenings, Saturdays, and the traditional Black Friday through Cyber Monday stretch. The net effect is fewer total security hours at retail locations compared to 2019, with those hours deployed more strategically.
Curbside Pickup: The New Security Headache
One development that nobody in security planned for a year ago is the explosion of curbside pickup. Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Home Depot, and dozens of other retailers now offer some version of “buy online, pick up at the curb.” It’s wildly popular with consumers. From a security perspective, it’s a mess.
Curbside pickup zones sit outside the store’s controlled environment. Customers pull into designated parking spots, an employee walks out with merchandise, and the transaction happens in the open. This creates several problems.
First, the merchandise is exposed during the walk from store to vehicle. A bag containing an $800 laptop, carried by a part-time seasonal employee across 50 feet of parking lot, is a target. It hasn’t happened frequently yet, and I couldn’t confirm any reported incidents in Tennessee specifically, though nationally there have been scattered reports of curbside theft.
Second, the pickup zone concentrates vehicles carrying recently purchased goods in a predictable location. Anyone watching knows that cars in those designated spots have merchandise in them. Follow the car, wait for the driver to make another stop, and you’ve got a car break-in target.
Third, the logistics of managing curbside traffic during peak periods create confusion that security teams aren’t trained to handle. Cars backed up, blocking lanes, double-parked, honking: it’s a parking lot management problem layered on top of a security function. Mall security guards who signed up to walk the food court are now directing traffic in a Walmart parking lot at dusk.
“We didn’t have a curbside security protocol 12 months ago,” said a regional security director for a major retailer with stores across Tennessee. “We built one in March. We’ve revised it four times since. It’s still not right.”
Memphis: Where the Warehouses Are
If retail security spending is shrinking at storefronts, it’s growing explosively behind them, in the warehouses and distribution centers that fulfill online orders.
Memphis handles more air cargo than any city in the Western Hemisphere, thanks to FedEx’s global hub at Memphis International Airport. The company’s Shelby County operations alone employ tens of thousands of workers, and holiday season pushes those numbers higher with seasonal hires. Every FedEx facility, from the massive hub to regional sort centers to the growing network of Ground distribution sites, requires security: access control, package integrity monitoring, vehicle screening, and perimeter patrol.
Amazon’s expansion in the Memphis metro adds another layer. The company operates multiple fulfillment centers in the area, with more under construction. Each facility needs security staff around the clock, and holiday volume means more shifts, more temporary workers entering secure areas, and more trucks coming and going at all hours.
Beyond the big two, Memphis hosts distribution operations for Nike, AutoZone, Medtronic, Williams-Sonoma, and dozens of other companies that chose the city for its central location and transportation infrastructure. The holiday spike in e-commerce means every one of these facilities is running harder and longer than normal, and every one of them needs proportionally more security.
One Memphis security contractor told me his company has added 22 warehouse-related guard posts since September, all for holiday volume. He’s still short-staffed on eight of them.
“The warehouse clients are steady,” he said. “They pay on time, the work is consistent, and the facilities are climate-controlled. My guards prefer it to standing outside a strip mall. I can’t blame them.”
The Organized Retail Crime Angle
Tennessee’s ORC problem predates COVID and will outlive it. Memphis in particular sits at the intersection of several factors that attract organized retail theft: major interstate highways (I-40, I-55) that provide easy escape routes, a high density of national retail chains with resalable merchandise, and proximity to flea markets and online resale channels where stolen goods are laundered.
The Tennessee Retail Crime Partnership, an industry group that coordinates loss prevention efforts among retailers and law enforcement, reported that ORC-related losses in Tennessee exceeded $100 million in 2019. The 2020 figure is harder to project because lower foot traffic may reduce opportunistic theft while organized groups adapt their tactics.
Some of that adaptation involves targeting curbside and delivery operations. A trend emerging in other states involves intercepting delivery drivers or stealing packages from porches in coordinated sweeps through residential neighborhoods. Memphis’s porch piracy problem, already significant before the pandemic, is expected to worsen during the holidays as package volume reaches all-time highs.
Retailers that invested in security technology, particularly camera systems with analytics and license plate readers in parking lots, are better positioned to identify and track ORC activity. Physical security staff remain essential for real-time intervention, and the holiday hiring challenge applies to loss prevention positions just as much as it does to guard services.
How Retailers Are Spending Differently
The net picture for holiday retail security spending in Tennessee looks something like this:
Down: Total in-store guard hours, particularly during weekday off-peak periods. Event security for holiday shopping events (many retailers are spreading deals across November rather than concentrating on a single Black Friday). Mall common-area patrol during lower-traffic periods.
Up: Warehouse and distribution center security, driven by e-commerce volume. Parking lot patrol during curbside pickup hours. Loss prevention technology (cameras, analytics, EAS systems). Seasonal loss prevention investigators focused on ORC.
Flat: Total dollar spend is roughly similar to 2019 for most large retailers, though the allocation has shifted dramatically. What would have gone to a guard standing at the front door now goes to monitoring a loading dock at a distribution center.
For security companies, this shift favors those with warehouse and logistics experience over those who built their business on retail storefront accounts. A guard company that has spent years staffing mall security posts is finding that work harder to come by. A company with distribution center experience is turning away business.
The Workers Themselves
It’s worth spending a minute on the guards who’ll staff these posts through the holiday season. Most of them earn between $10 and $13 an hour. Many are working second jobs. A meaningful percentage are seasonal hires who received minimal training before being posted at a warehouse gate or a parking lot entrance.
Holiday shifts are long, often overnight, frequently outdoors. A guard working the parking lot at a Memphis-area Walmart on Black Friday night will stand in 40-degree weather for eight hours, manage impatient shoppers, and deal with whatever incidents arise, all for roughly $85 before taxes.
These aren’t complaints from the guards themselves. Most of the officers I’ve spoken with over the years accept the conditions as part of the job. They’d prefer better pay and indoor posts, sure. They’d prefer reliable schedules and health insurance. What they get is a paycheck and, in most cases, an employer who will give them as many hours as they want during the holidays.
The labor market dynamics of 2020 haven’t fundamentally changed the security guard’s experience during the holiday season. The work is still hard. The pay is still low. The hours are still long. What’s changed is where the work happens, and this year, for a growing number of guards in Tennessee, it happens in a warehouse rather than a storefront.
That shift is probably permanent. The guards who end up at distribution centers this holiday season and prove reliable will likely get offered year-round positions. The ones who would have worked seasonal retail security may find fewer of those gigs available next November too. E-commerce doesn’t go backward.
Neither does the security spending that follows it.